On the Cover: The Politics of Seeing Pregnancy

abstract: Frida Kahlo's artistic rendering of childbirth appears on the cover of this issue of Technology and Culture . This essay invites readers to view the history of medicine and technology through images, by tracing multi-sited genealogies of their visual cultures. The shifting representations of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion can enrich historical research and teaching on twentieth-century reproductive biomedicine by foregrounding how images produce, circulate, and contest knowledge and power. Yet the different meanings attributed to the same image in different cultures and political regimes underscore that they cannot be fully understood without their historiography and their political work as visual artifacts.